


Red Mother

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Crockertier, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 05:44:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5528267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She turns to meet your gaze, and her nose crinkles when she smiles, just like you. It’s something you’ve seen in the mirror a thousand times, practicing your expressions, prodding your cheeks and grinning wide. Against the vastness of a different life, it’s a small familiar thing: the shape of her smile, the way it changes her face. A small thing, but it’s yours.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red Mother

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ForestFiresong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ForestFiresong/gifts).



> Hey Forestfiresong! Thank you so much for the wonderful prompt, writing this was so interesting. I hope you enjoy it, and happy holidays!

She appears, all green fire and casual strength. A smile and tangled hair. Striped socks, sparkling shoes, and the two tails of her hood floating in the cool air of the Incipisphere.

She speaks to Jake first. They are a matching set, green-eyed and beautiful. They’ve both grown up under the island sun, burning their bare backs and finding solace in the shade, scraping their knees bloody, leaving themselves bruised. They grew up alone, missing a version of each other, the trees and white beasts their only company. Did they feel at home there? The crescent of the island circling them, cradling them. The pumpkin vines growing up and around them. The open sea. The blue sky.

She turns to meet your gaze, and her nose crinkles when she smiles, just like you. It’s something you’ve seen in the mirror a thousand times, practicing your expressions, prodding your cheeks and grinning wide. Against the vastness of a different life, it’s a small familiar thing: the shape of her smile, the way it changes her face. A small thing, but it’s yours.

“And you must be Jane?” she says.

A moment. Maybe a minute. That’s all the three of you get, Jade, Jake, and you.

Jade’s head jerks to the left.

Something happens far away, something none of you can see. Something seizes her and her smile and her tangled hair, envelops her, consumes. She starts to buzz with static and her green fire burns wild and strong. She snarls and growls like a feral dog, like a monster, vicious with the anger and savagery of nature, and her breath is hot, and she blinks in and out with the blinding light of a distant sun, and she has gray fur, and she has sharp fangs.

You’re scared, but not for long. She extends a hand.

There’s a pain between your eyes—it splits your skull, it spits sparks into the air—and then you’re calm. Everything is so clear now, you feel like SUBMIT you’ve unscrewed the top of the universe and looked inside. Circuitry burns cold under your skin. You OBEY are so strong. You’ve never felt strong before.

Jade disappears with a crack of green energy, but before she does you briefly hold each others’ gaze. Her eyes are blinding. Your eyes are black holes. CONSUME

\--

The Condesce smiles over you, pink lipstick and nails. She’s old, you can tell, older than she looks. She calls the two of you her girls, her weapons. She calls you her heiress, and she calls Jade her crazy-wolf-baby. Roxy always warned you away from her, this batterwitch, but you’re over Roxy, over her drama and her drinking and her little kind of love. The Condesce smiles wider. It’s time for you to inherit. It’s time for Jade to howl.

If Jade is a wolf, you think, then maybe you should mind your new-red hood. If you came upon her in the woods would she attack you, biting, gnawing with her sharp teeth?

Or is the story changed? You are the one who sent her into the forest, the wolf’s mother, who packed a basket of treats for her long-haired and pink-lipsticked wolf grandmother. Don’t go near the path, you say, for there are hunters there and they will eat you up. But like Little Red, she disobeys.

\--

Jade is with Roxy in one jail cell, negotiating the creation of the matriorb. She’s a space player, now more than ever. She can move however she wants, and be wherever she chooses in an instant. She can make things small, or make them large, or destroy them completely. More than anything, the physical space of her is undeniable. When she enters rooms, she fills them. When she approaches planets, she engulfs them. But even now, with all that, she still cannot create.

Next to her, Roxy, in her void colors and dark mask, seems almost to disappear. Even before she got her blue hood, she always seemed strangely insubstantial. Now she is almost transparent. The ground around her is littered with green cubes, and she clenches her fists with fear and concentration.

In another cell, you visit Jake. He’s just the same. He treats you just like he did before, complaining and non-apologizing and wearing his stupid hot underwear. Doesn’t he know? Doesn’t he know who you are now? Doesn’t he know your plans for him? You tell him. You tell him he will be silent and pretty, and you will hate him and use him, and he will be a part of your empire but he will never, _ever_ be above you. You tell him he will not hurt you again.

He doesn’t speak so prettily now, does he? He doesn’t open his mouth and let the dumb old-timey vocabulary and insensitive blunderings pour out. So this was the solution, all along. To keep him from talking, make him cry. To keep him from hurting you, hurt him first.

“Is this what I was like all the time?” Jade says to you in the hallway outside the cells. Her voice is casual, but you can see something in the clench of her clawed hands. “I wonder. Underneath what I was before…”

“Yes,” you say. “We both were.”

(It’s been an hour now, and your breath has started to burn your lungs with ice. Your whole body itches sometimes, a horrible itch down through your skin. Sometimes you can’t breathe and your bones feels like they’re breaking down. Like you’re dying. Like you’re being born.)

\--

You travel together to the forest of her world. It’s nice here, all the green trees and red flowers and little hummingbirds. The two of you are out of place, crackling and pulsing with your unnatural powers.

You don’t know these two, these dark-haired trolls—Kanaya, standing strong. Karkat, cowering behind her. You stay silent as Jade talks to them and taunts them, listening instead to the electric processes in your own brain. You always used to worry about what to say. Now you realize that if you have enough power, you can say nothing.

It’s easy to kill Karkat. The three tines of the fork pierce his chest, and you’re surprised to see that he bleeds red, like you—or do you still bleed red, now? Do you even still bleed? Kanaya weeps over him, and John screams in horror and loss. Who will weep over you, you wonder. The Batterwitch? At least you know that Jade will be the one who screams.

It’s easy to bring Karkat back, too. This new blue power that courses through you does not feel out of place, or strange, or undeserved. It’s only natural that someone as strong and right and true as you would have it. Like everything, it is your birthright.

Jade disappears to follow John, to find Dave somewhere. You hope she gets a chance to hurt him, to give him back the pain that he gave her. God, you know it feels so good.

You turn back to Karkat and Kanaya.

(Another hour has passed now. Slowly it has stopped, the burning, the itching, the breaking. Or maybe you just can’t feel it anymore.)

\--

Things start going wrong, eventually.

The yellow battleship where it shouldn’t be.

The girl in the blue dress.

The piercing light of Jake in the Dersite sky, burning almost brighter even than Jade’s green sun.

The lava is bubbling beneath you. Another ship approaches, pink and huge, eclipsing the sky. When the house comes toppling down on Jade, your rage is quiet and your hurt is numbed to nothing.

When you fall asleep, you know you won’t ever wake.

(You never reach the next hour.)

\--

You’re somewhere else now, both of you.

 _This must be a dream bubble_ , you think.

You’re sitting in a pale winter forest. Above you is a white tower. The two of you are beneath the trees, the wind blowing snow around and through you. Jade, face wet with tears, is growling and whining and sobbing. The air mists around her from the heat of her breath, and her hot tears hiss when they hit the snowy ground.

You wonder if this is the alpha timeline. Maybe somewhere else there is a Jade and a Jane who made it through this.

“Shh,” you say. You smooth Jade’s tangled hair and lay your arm gentle across her shivering back. “Hush now,” you say, “everything will be okay.”

The dream bubble shifts around you, forest changing to warm sunny beach, beach changing to the sidewalk in front of your old house, scattered with autumn leaves. Far above you, you see the iridescent soapy sheen of its surface.

Jade slowly stops crying, but you continue to pet her, to sooth her. Her striped socks are dirty at the knees. Her hair occasionally crackles with lightning.

She’s your lovely daughter. She’s your little wolf.

 

You sit together and watch the blue sky.


End file.
